"I have been to Upsala," the Moon told me. "I looked down on the great plain covered
with coarse grass and on the barren fields. I saw my image in the river Fyris, while the steamer
frightened away the fishes into the rushes. The clouds chased one another beneath me, throwing their long
shadows upon the graves of Odin and Thor and Freya, as the hills there are called. The names have been cut
in the thin turf that covers the hills; here there is no memorial stone where the traveler can engrave his
name, no rock wall whereon he can paint it. So the visitor cuts it into the turf, and the bare earth along
the range of hills is covered with a network of letters and names - an immortality which lasts until the
next growth of turf.

"Upon the hilltop a man stood, a poet. He emptied a mead horn decorated with a broad silver ring,
and whispered a name that he charged the breezes not to betray; but I heard it, and I knew it. The coronet
of a count sparkled above it, and therefore he did not name it aloud. I smiled. For the crown of a poet
sparkles above his! The name of Eleanora d'Este is with Tasso's. I too know where the rose of
beauty blooms. . . ."

Thus the Moon spoke, but then a cloud passed between us. Oh, that clouds might never come between the
poet and the rose!